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Monthly Archives: February 2012

Timeline for Pages launched today and the New York Times Timeline is awesome.

For me New York Times has a special place in terms of journalism. I can see it clearly when I see its FacebookTimeline today. There are moments from 160 year history. Go and check its newsroom by the night of the 1928 presidential election. You can also see its reporters during 1977 blackout and Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s.

They are planning to update their Timeline with key milestones from 1851 through the present. It is like a live history book . Visit and enjoy more !

With how ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ plus ‘retweets’ are becoming more and more important in getting the word out, the big search engines have started to realize that those public announcements are like a vote of confidence from the sharer. Permanent links were what all SEOs had dreamed about. Now, SEOs are hoping to get their links shared by influential tweeters, which are proving to influence search ranking factors.

We are all living the marketing high life. Today, great inbound marketers can transform their business thanks to “free” traffic and leads from social media and search engines. Sure, this traffic isn’t exactly free — marketers have to invest in time and tools to take advantage of these inbound channels. But inbound leads are still 61 percent less expensive than outbound leads. There is a generation which reshape with the impact of social media. Here are some examples :

“If you’re not on MySpace, you don’t exist” – Skyler, 18, to her mom

“I’m in the 7th grade. I’m 13. I’m not a cheerleader. I’m not the president of the student body. Or captain of the debate team. I’m not the prettiest girl in my class. I’m not the most popular girl in my class. I’m just a kid. I’m a little shy. And it’s really hard in this school to impress people enough to be your friend if you’re not any of those things. But I go on these really great vacations with my parents between Christmas and New Year’s every year. And I take pictures of places we go. And write about those places. And I post this on my Xanga. Because I think if kids in school read what I have to say and how I say it, they’ll want to be my friend.”

Like some of conservative communities, young males are early adopters of digital platforms. When you look at the age and gender distribution, males are mostly twice of female users in terms of internet and social media. It is valid for Turkey and I am sure most of the emerging markets.

This reality is almost opposite in US. From Valley Girls to the Kardashians, young women have long been mocked for the way they talk. Some linguists suggest that women are more sensitive to social interactions and hence more likely to adopt subtle vocal cues. Others say women use language to assert their power in a culture that, at least in days gone by, asked them to be sedate and decorous. Another theory is that young women are simply given more leeway by society to speak flamboyantly. What I am saying is the more democratic communities help women to raise their voice and stand beyond the development of the society. What about your theories ?

Technology is changing. If your brand is part of it, it is obvious that it changes with it. Social networking is the important part of our lives which million of people share the content they like to others. Social media is a part of social web with the main focus of interaction of the information, creation of networks, maintanence of relationships, colloboration and communication.

Video sharing takes big percantage of this new digital age. Around 800 million people visit YouTube every month, and they watch and upload a staggering amount of video there every day. It works really, really well.

YouTube head Salar Kamangar has a bunch of answers for this question, but eventually you can get to the one that really matters:

He thinks that making the site look more like traditional TV will convince marketers to pay traditional TV ad rates.

He explained the concept at D: Dive Into Media last month: “If you see a dog on a skateboard video, the CPMs, the cost per thousand impressions, are about $2. Now, if you package that as part of a dog lover’s channel or a skateboarding interest channel, that same video can command a $20 CPM.”

YouTube is going to depend on advertising for most of its revenue, but Kamangar also discussed YouTube’s interest in offering subscription services down the road. Given that Kamangar, Google’s ninth employee, oversees all of the company’s video efforts, that’s worth keeping in mind as it edges closer to selling cable TV.

The moment Mail.ru and Yandex investors have been waiting for has arrived: Russia, at long last, has finally surpassed Germany to become the largest internet market in Europe.

According to comScore, the research firm, Russia had 50.8m internet users in September versus 50.1m users in Germany. And, luckily for those who bought into Russian internet stocks such as Mail.ru and Yandex at sky-high valuations, the market still has a lot of growth left.

With broadband penetration set to reach 60m people in Russia this year – a third of the population – there is still a large swath of the country where the internet revolution has yet to take hold.

GP Bullhound, a techonology-focused investment group, predicts there will be 93m Russian broadband customers by 2013. Of those customers, 71m will be using 3G mobile phones.

This is good news for big internet groups, such as Mail.ru and Yandex, which have spent the past year justifying their initial offering valuations.

Their share prices appear to be evidence that the two group’s initial valuations were inflated. But actually the companies have been surprising the market with better-than-expected earnings.

According to comScore, Russia easily beats France, the UK and Italy for the number of its internet users. But it does not even enter the top rankings for the amount of time these users spend on the internet, falling behind countries such as the UK, the Netherlands and Turkey. While the average European spent 26.4 hours on the internet in September, the average Russian user spent just 22.4 hours.

March is coming and rumors dont stop ! The next Apple press event on March 7 : iPad 3 or other surprise ! Who’s going to upgrade, and who will sit on the sidelines, enjoying their current version of the iPad, or no iPad at all?

Let’s take a look at this infographic, which deals with who’s going to upgrade, and what people expect to do with the iPad 3.

To get this data, researchers at AYTM conducted two surveys, 2,000 Americans who don’t own an iPad, and the other questionnaire queried 500 iPad owners. Both were conducted this month. Here’s AYTM’s full interactive stats report for the iPad owners part of the study.

Pinterest is getting more popular. Daily visitors has reached 1.36 million. When we look at the age distribution, 25-34 yrs old group is the most frequent user group. There are some rumors that Facebook wants to acquire Pinterest, lets see whats gonna happen soon..

Time for Mobile World Congress. It is a big event where thousands of people and companies meet each other. I liked Facebook CTO ‘s keynote speech :

To help developers reach more people, we’re committed to providing distribution across all platforms. The Open Graph, combined with News Feed and Timeline, helps people discover new apps through friends, regardless of the technology stack used.

We see more people accessing Facebook on the mobile web than from our top native apps combined, so we know the mobile web is important for reach. So why aren’t more people building apps for the mobile web? We hear from developers that there are three challenge areas that make it hard to build on the mobile web: app discovery, mobile browser fragmentation and payments.App Discovery

Our hope is that Facebook Platform addresses the app discovery issue head-on – by connecting your app to Open Graph, all 425 million people who use Facebook’s mobile apps will be able to discover your app. We’ve been helping people discover iOS and mobile web apps since October, and as announced today in Mobile World Congress, we’ll soon extend this to native Android apps.

Mobile browser fragmentation and payments, on the other hand, are industry-wide problems that no individual company can fix by themselves. Today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona we are excited to announce a couple of industry-wide initiatives to address these issues.

Mobile Browser Fragmentation

When you build for the mobile web today, it’s hard to know which browsers and devices will support your app. Which is why we’re proud to be joining over 30 device manufacturers, carriers, and developers in an industry-wide effort to help accelerate the improvement and standardization of mobile browsers: the W3C Mobile Web Platform Core Community Group. For developers, this makes it easier to understand your app’s potential reach and to help prioritize which browser capabilities are important to you.

At the same time, we’re making Ringmark, a new mobile browser test suite, available today, and we’ll be donating it to the Community Group to build upon. This test suite, developed together with Bocoup, helps you understand which mobile browsers support the functionality your app needs.

We’re working with operators around the world to minimize the number of steps needed to complete a transaction in mobile web apps, which will make it easier for hundreds of millions of people worldwide to purchase apps on their device via operator billing. This will be automatically enabled where carriers support it when you integrate the Pay Dialog into your app.

We’re excited to be working together with you – and all of our partners around the mobile industry – to make the mobile web a strong platform. You can find out more about these initiatives on our HTML5 blog, and on the W3C Community Group page.

Our hope is that these initiatives – the Open Graph, the Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group at the W3C, and our partnerships with carriers to improve mobile payments – will enable developers all over the world to build mobile experiences that improve the lives of billions of people.

Modern scientific and engineering research relies heavily on computer programs, which analyze experimental data and run simulations. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find a scientific paper (outside of pure theory) that didn’t involve code in some way. Unfortunately, most code written for research remains closed, even if the code itself is the subject of a published scientific paper. According to an editorial in Nature, this hinders reproducibility, a fundamental principle of the scientific method.

Reproducibility refers to the ability to repeat some work and obtain similar results. It is especially important when the results are unexpected or appear to defy accepted theories (for example, the recent faster-than-light neutrinos). Scientific papers include detailed descriptions of experimental methods—sometimes down to the specific equipment used—so that others can independently verify results and build upon the work.

Reproducibility becomes more difficult when results rely on software. The authors of the editorial argue that, unless research code is open sourced, reproducing results on different software/hardware configurations is impossible. The lack of access to the code also keeps independent researchers from checking minor portions of programs (such as sets of equations) against their own work.